Notwithstanding the contemptuous description of Lord Chesterfield’s personal appearance by Lord Hervey, his portraits represent a handsome, though hard countenance, well-marked features, and his figure and air appear to have been elegant.  With his commanding talents, his wonderful brilliancy and fluency of conversation, he would perhaps sometimes have been even tedious, had it not been for his invariable cheerfulness.  He was always, as Lord Hervey says, ‘present’ in his company.  Amongst the few friends who really loved this thorough man of the world, was Lord Scarborough, yet no two characters were more opposite.  Lord Scarborough had judgment, without wit:  Chesterfield wit, and no judgment; Lord Scarborough had honesty and principle; Lord Chesterfield had neither.  Everybody liked the one, but did not care for his company.  Everyone disliked the other, but wished for his company.  The fact was, Scarborough was ‘splendid and absent.’  Chesterfield ’cheerful and present:’  wit, grace, attention to what is passing, the surface, as it were, of a highly-cultured mind, produced a fascination with which all the honour and respectability in the Court of George II. could not compete.

In the earlier part of Chesterfield’s career, Pope, Bolingbroke, Hervey, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and, in fact, all that could add to the pleasures of the then early dinner-table, illumined Chesterfield House by their wit and gaiety.  Yet in the midst of this exciting life, Lord Chesterfield found time to devote to the improvement of his natural son, Philip Stanhope, a great portion of his leisure.  His celebrated Letters to that son did not, however, appear during the earl’s life; nor were they in any way the source of his popularity as a wit, which was due to his merits in that line alone.

The youth to whom these letters, so useful and yet so objectionable, were addressed, was intended for a diplomatist.  He was the very reverse of his father:  learned, sensible, and dry; but utterly wanting in the graces, and devoid of eloquence.  As an orator, therefore, he failed; as a man of society, he must also have failed; and his death, in 1768, some years before that of his father, left that father desolate, and disappointed.  Philip Stanhope had attained the rank of envoy to Dresden, where he expired.

During the five years in which Chesterfield dragged out a mournful life after this event, he made the painful discovery that his son had married without confiding that step to the father to whom he owed so much.  This must have been almost as trying as the awkward, ungraceful deportment of him whom he mourned.  The world now left Chesterfield ere he had left the world.  He and his contemporary Lord Tyrawley were now old and infirm.  ‘The fact is,’ Chesterfield wittily said, ’Tyrawley and I have been dead these two years, but we don’t choose to have it known.’